Emma Kohut
At the End of Lonely Street
Marcelle can’t shake the feeling that something’s about to happen. As though tides are turning, compressing tons of ocean in an oscillation of force, Mother Nature flipping over an open palm.
She sets her broom on the screen door and ventures down the steps of the back porch in long and fast strides. One of her daughters, Donna, squats like a frog to pet their American Shorthair. The other, Linda, rides her horse beyond in the corral and avoids looking in her mother’s direction, Marcelle knows, because she wants to stay out as long as possible.
Marcelle lifts the lid to the chicken coop and counts. Don’t be silly, girl. She hears her mother’s voice that dismisses her self-indulgent thoughts. But before she knows it, Marcelle is in the barn. One cow, two goats, one red-eyed rabbit. She scours every inch of their two acres of land in her mind's eye, running her hand down each banister and crossing wood planks in the place between memory and consciousness. Everything is as it should be.
Nevertheless, she senses something. A whistle of wind growing louder, bringing familiar restlessness and claustrophobia. Her back is now to the barn, she notices a wave of tension forming in her body as if her very cells are bracing for impact.
For a current of blue air that started in the middle of the Pacific has gained speed, grazed the surface of decaying nests of sulphuric algae and rubbed pelican stomachs and combed through braids of sand and kelp and tiptoed over the hot cement boardwalk and collected grey from the exhaust pipes and traveled away and away and away from the seaboard while rattling scattered soda cans on the inland empire and mingled with the dry north currents as together they bent off onto a dirt road to shake balls of seeds loose from girthy Sycamores and gather speed in a great cluster of spring and movement and hustle to fly through the sun-stained dry grasses of rolling hills that hug western La Puente to lift heads to swaying palms and rattle everyone’s already fraying nerves to insist and remind and warn that the golden state is always in motion and, finally, in a bleached and frenzied crescendo, pull Marcelle’s curly hair in a veil over her face.
It’s just an episode. Give it a rest. Marcelle tries to self-soothe, though she feels a familiar pulsing in her temple and a desire to lie down. She hears Sam’s wheels coming up the drive. She itches to go inside, for ice in her drink and something else, though she’s already had two today.
“Let’s go, girls!”
Out of the corner of her eye, Linda sees her sister move towards her mother and turns her cream-colored horse, Miss Hap, away. Just a few more loops and then she’ll follow. Linda kicks into a gallop, her hands clinging to a black mane.
This is the image Linda will hold on to when she thinks of that farm. The incoming wind, the blazing afternoons and burnt skin, her hair damp from sweat and dried in minutes, ragged curls falling out of a braid. Her mother throwing feed to the chickens, the laugh of her barefooted sister, Sam’s black Plymouth sedan pulling into the drive.
“Why did you ever leave La Puente?”
Unlike her mother, Linda had no desire to think beyond the farm. In retrospect, she can see the signs that something was wrong. Her mother sprawled on the sofa with the curtains shrouding the whole room in blankets of black, not to be disturbed. Frequent trips out of town where her mother told them not to tell their father, the car filled with half-haphazardly thrown suitcases and sandwiches with cold cuts and mayo. The girls crouched under the seats in the backseat, their blood pulsing with fear, as Marcelle weaved precariously in and out of lanes on the Ventura freeway.
As she tells this story six decades later, the glaring gaps and selective holes require soft redirection.
“Where did you go?”
She never felt unloved by Marcelle and always wanted to be around her. The shine of adolescence and youth glamorized her mother’s bouts of addiction-fueled carelessness, so even when a woman in a suit drove them to live with their father and stepmother, Linda always thought that she and her sister would find their way back to the farm.
“We had to go upstate, you know. Where the nuns cut off the warts on my fingers with a blade. You know the story…And well, I guess Mother was getting help.”
La Puente, as its name suggests, is an in-between place, a bridge from one corner of Los Angeles to the next. In the shadow of the Hollywood sign, it had the insecure air of someplace that stood straight but wavered, knowing that the industry of the rest of the star-studded town loomed close, approaching, creeping towards the inland valley.
At that time, as far as Linda was concerned, all that mattered was ironing her dress for the dance and getting to ride Miss Hap. Often, she and Donna would walk down to Main Street and the corner drug store, filling their mother’s prescription written in cursive by the phone doctor, then using two nickels to buy a Baby Ruth at the 76 gas station on the opposite corner. Linda would snap it in two, a string of golden caramel as she pulled it apart, her fingers sticky brown. She held Donna’s hand over the cracks in the pavement, not letting go of that ironclad grip over the bumps of the tumultuous years that would follow.
“Why did she need help? Was she in rehab?”
Linda sips her wine, staring in a way that seems like she didn’t hear the question.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”
In 1957, life was simple and straightforward. Two girls wandering unafraid, as though they were tiptoeing unawares on a tightrope over Niagara Falls, the whole world balanced on the curb of Main Street. “Don’t step on that crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.” Singing, pharmacy bag with 30 milligrams of Butisol in its cylinder a jiggling maraca, white socks and Mary Janes, curly hair tied in two ribbons, “Heartbreak Hotel” coming through a window, cows grazing on the Atterman’s farm, shoving fists full of hay through the fence, “Come on, open up you loon-a-tic,” new words sliding off their tongues, recycled ideas from teachers and friends and adults and the radio clanging around in their minds. Rattling, bursting to get out.
There is a pause, her granddaughter reaches out and rubs her on her forearm.
“Did I ever tell you I was afraid of the dark?”
“You were?” Her granddaughter laughs.
“No, really. I was terrified. I was a timid, anxious child, at least before my parents split. One time, I think back when they lived together… Around that time I got up in the night and had to go to the bathroom. And somehow or other, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell ya, I ended up in the tub. I must have sat there, stone cold and scared to death for hours and hours. Then Daddy finally found me and said, ‘For god sakes Linda, what are you doing in the tub?’ And he would laugh and laugh as he told that story. I swear I wouldn’t want to get out of bed at night after that.”
“He really loved your mom.”
“Oh, yeah. Even afterward. He would say that she was the love of his life.”
“Even though he hit her.”
“You know… It wasn’t so black and white. Yes, it was horrible, though, really just horrible. But I didn’t think about it like that back then. I didn’t really think about it at all.”
She reaches backward, through the years of two marriages, three daughters, three more adopted children, eight grandchildren, grasping at what could possibly have been going through her mother’s mind.
There is Marcelle, in the dulled light of late afternoon on the porch, feeding seeds to the parakeet in its cage. The farm, the animals, her daughter riding horseback, it was all because of her. And she would hold onto them for as long as she could, despite a high school level of education, a pregnancy at seventeen. She had done it, had tried her best.
Linda remembers how much she had wished it had been just the three of them out here, unburdened by men. There was never a moment when Marcelle wasn’t tied to a man as daughter, sister, girlfriend, wife, ex-wife. She was a magnet for men, a phrase Linda had heard often. Marcelle’s blue eyes, dark features, small frame. She had an aloofness that often came off as indifference and drove men wild, hungry for the chase. Really, her distance was a mask for insecurity and introversion, a longing for the company of those who knew her well. As hard as Linda tries to see it clearly, much is still unknown to her about her mother. Like looking into binoculars the wrong way around, the image is distant and ambiguous.
“You know, what I told you before…It wasn’t really true. Well, it wasn’t really the whole story… I did know there was something wrong with Mother. We all did. Grandma Chassie blames the doctor. She said that he killed her. Got her hooked on barbiturates. Those were big back then, you know. She took ‘em when we weren’t around…But somehow I knew what she was doing. I’ll never forget that time when we all drove up with Sam to the coast, past San Simeon. You know where that is, just by Hearst Castle? Where that rich man made a castle for himself on a mountain by the coast? Oh, it was marvelous. We went to see the elephant seals… Or are they called sea lions? I can’t remember–those big fat ones that lie on the beach and bark at each other. Oh yes, we really did have the best time. We drove all the way there and sat in the back of the car and watched those animals and had a picnic or whatever…And Sam and Mother were very affectionate, you realize they were really in love. He really loved her. I think she wanted to give him a child, but I don’t think she could anymore…
I think we were her reason, you know, why she held on the way she did. I think she knew that she was going too fast. Mother always had two feet on the gas. What? Ha, no, no, not like that. We didn’t get in an accident, no… I just mean she was, well, rolling down and down and no one could stop her.
It makes me think of that movie ‘An Affair to Remember.’ How despite everything they come back to each other. Cary Grant is all mad at Deborah Kerr because she never showed up at the Empire State Building but it turns out that she was crippled. Right? That’s how it was with Mother, she wanted to but she just couldn’t. I always thought that she would have done anything for her girls.”
Linda strokes her horse one last time and pulls the corral gate shut. She runs to the porch and closes the sliding screen door. She hops out of her riding clothes and into pajamas and joins Donna, who is lying on her stomach on the shag carpet watching The Mickey Mouse Club. Sam is home, loosening his tie and falling back on the sofa. Marcelle comes out of the bathroom in her nightgown, leans over and kisses him on the mouth and sinks into his body on the couch.
Outside, clothes stir on the line. A current comes in through the living room window and passes over their figures illuminated in the blue glow, their faces frozen with laughter, passing by and through them, little more than grains of sand.
